Second Violin (17 page)

‘Tell me,’ Freud began eagerly, ‘. . . tell me about London. I can get out so rarely these days. It is what it always was to me . . . a city I know through books. Tell me, what
you have seen, what you have done lately.’

‘Well . . . today I breakfasted with my younger son, who has become, of all things, a policeman. You may imagine what qualms this caused me. However, they were long ago. I am reconciled.
And I lunched with one of our London society hostesses of whom you have surely never heard – Daffy Carfax.’

‘Indeed . . . I have never heard of her.’

‘And among the guests was Wells.’

‘H.G.?’

‘Is there another?’

‘The young one, the one in America who convinced them only last year that we were being invaded by Mars.’

‘I must have slept through that one. No, it was H.G., the same old H.G. Wells who first brought me to England thirty years ago. Well, thirty all but a few weeks.’

‘Wells, Wells. What I wouldn’t give to get the bugger on that couch. And how was he?’

‘Full of doom and gloom. The fate of
Homo sapiens
. . . mankind is . . . what was his phrase . . . “at the end if its tether” . . . it’s time is over . . . we must
now give way to other, if not actually superior, beings. It’s nothing more than a new variation on his old song. He predicts. He always has. It’s the trade he’s in. You know he
actually called an anthology of his stuff
Predictions and Prophecies
. . . or perhaps it was the other way round? He predicts the worst most of the time and most of the time he’s
wrong. But he’s onto his third reprint of his latest, so he’s happy. A quick survey of civilisation, a bit of a bash at the Jews . . .’

‘Anything new?’

‘No . . . same old stuff, even quotes that rather corny clerihew that goes “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” You have to say it properly. I can never quite get the
rhythm.’

‘What’s a clerihew?’

‘Not really sure, but it’s something English. Something like a limerick that isn’t a limerick.’

‘And what does he have to say about Nazis?’

‘Oh he’s unequivocal about that. Hitler is a nutcase. And then he goes on to warn us about how focussed complete nutcases can be.’

‘Do you think he’s read any of my stuff . . . you know . . .
Civilisation and its Discontents
?’

‘I’d be quite prepared to bet he hasn’t.’

‘You know . . . I don’t have much more in me. I’ve almost finished a new book . . . quite possibly my last . . . it will be translated into English as soon as I do finish . . .
Moses and Monotheism
. . . I have put the book aside so many times these last few years . . . so many false starts.’

‘What’s it about?’ Alex asked in much the same tone of voice with which one asked of a Hollywood film ‘who’s in it?’

‘Moses.’

‘Yeees.’

‘And death.’

‘Moses’ death? How did he die?’

‘The Jews killed him.’

‘And . . .?’

‘And then they invented the faith to contain their guilt.’

‘Interesting,’ said Alex. ‘You’re going to upset a lot of people.’

‘I already have. I have received . . . what would you say? . . . overtures? Overtures urging me not to publish. A personal visit from Professor Yehuda. Letters to the press would not
surprise me.’

‘I’ll let you know if I get anything.’

‘But it is . . . personal to me . . . a meditation on death, by one who feels its hand upon him.’

‘I feel death’s hand every day. And all I get asked about is sodding politics. Why does no one ask me about death?’

‘Everybody asks me about sex.’

‘I’ve done politics. I’ve done sex. Shall we now do death?’

‘I don’t see why not. Take the couch, Alex. Put your feet up. Politics, sex and death are the three most interesting things on earth. High time we tackled the last.’

Alex sat tentatively on the couch, felt history under each buttock.

‘Please, please. I shall take my old seat too.’

Alex swung his legs up onto the couch. Freud disappeared into the green chair behind him.

‘God – this takes me back. Vienna . . . 1908.’

‘1907.’

‘If you say so . . . now . . . where were we?’

‘We were dying,’ Freud replied.

An hour or so later two men in their eighties shook hands on the threshhold.

Freud said, over the handshake, ‘A favour if you would . . . please ask Wells to come and see me. I fear he needs my services more than you do.’

Daffy Carfax held luncheon in much the same way the football league played soccer. Tranmere Rovers v. Accrington Stanley – Accrington Stanley v. Tranmere Rovers . . .
there would always be a return match. Alex was not in the least surprised when she phoned him up a couple of weeks later and told him she had ‘some really really interesting people you really
really should meet’, and was surprised only at the extremity of Daffy’s choice. Left, Right he was used to, but it was rarely Alex sat down to break bread with someone he thought of as
an outright fascist, and certainly rare this close to the inevitable war.

He was not seated next to Daffy, he found himself next to the spare, wolfish figure of the Marquess of Fermanagh, an old-school Tory, thoroughly anti-Churchill, almost as thoroughly
anti-Chamberlain, a man whose power to blackball had been formidable in its day but whose powers were now waning. He’d flirted with fascism – who hadn’t? the friends of Oswald
Mosley were legion – had been briefly quite impressed by the young Mosley and now gave the impression of being impressed by no one. The seat on his other side was empty. Beyond that sat
Humphrey Rogerson, a humpty-dumpty, right-wing economic theorist who opposed the theories of John Maynard Keynes with the simple idea that there was nothing one could do about economics therefore
one should do nothing. The remarkable thing was that he earned a living saying this at inordinate length. Next to him was one of the young turks of British politics, Geoffrey Trench MP – a
man whose membership of the Conservative Party must have been baffling to many conservatives as he was an outspoken fascist. Alex occasionally wondered why they didn’t just boot him out, but
he would in all probability merely stand again in his own seat and win and, of course, no one wanted to see a fascist elected to the House and thus legitimised. Trench was better for the Tories in
their own margin – but it was, Alex thought, such a wide, such a loud margin. And beyond him, Arnold Palfrey-Greeve, leader writer on the
Daily Mail
, a man who had tried his utmost to
rally the nation to the cause of British Fascism until Lord Rothermere had tired of all the street-fighting and finally relented on his headline of ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. A
deeply unpleasant man, Alex thought, but . . . if asked by Rothermere, Palfrey-Greeve would write headlines calling for the appointment of a turnip as Minister of Transport.

Given the nature of this motley, Alex could not have been more surprised when the vacant seat was taken by Daffy’s husband, Mungo. Mungo didn’t lunch.

‘You again?’ Mungo said jocularly.

‘The bad penny,’ Alex replied.

Mungo leaned in confidentially ‘They’re all bad pennies, Alex. The old girl seems attracted by the odd buggers in life, but I’ll tell you . . . this lot take the
biscuit.’

Mungo slurped into his consommé. Alex looked around the table, heard Rogerson holding forth, saw Daffy smiling inanely as though she understood, and decided Mungo was right. Daffy
collected oddities – and he was surely one himself – but this lot were the oddest of all.

Alex had long thought it a mistake to dismiss fascism as merely rabble-rousing. That its practice degenerated so rapidly to mob violence and street-fighting was inherent, but its politics were
as diverse as the people who supported them – most not for long – and as varied as the nations that spawned them in the wake of the Great War. For years it seemed Britain had been
striving to evolve a fascism that was ‘British’, for almost as long the model had been Italian – far, far more people, looked to Mussolini as an exemplar than would ever look to
Hitler – H.G. Wells had been an admirer for a while, so had Churchill. Then Franco had seemed to elicit an absurd level of British support from many respectable, intelligent people –
Victor Cazalet was one – who had found something admirable in his blatantly anti-democratic usurpation of Spain. Of late the German model had prevailed, but then that had begun with mob
violence and street-fighting. Along the way, Oswald Mosley had moved from Conservative to being loosely allied to the Liberals, to sitting in the house for Labour as Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, and, in the end, to being the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Along that way – and this was easy to forget – he had uttered statements, written papers, on economic
matters, that had been taken seriously, been respected and discussed as a means to ending mass unemployment and ultimately ignored. The problem with fascism, the scary thing about fascism, as
Mosley’s career exmplified, was that it touched most other ideologies – sooner or later something in its ragbag ideology overlapped with what you believed yourself or what the party of
your choice purported to believe.

Thank God, Alex thought, for the likes of Geoffrey Trench – a thirty-five-year-old demagogue with whom it was impossible to find a square inch of common ground. He was a successful young
man – Eton and Oxford, elected to the House of Commons in a by-election before he was thirty – handsome, tall, letting a stubby moustache brutalise an otherwise pleasing face. And he
was just what the occasion called for – the complete fascist bastard one could despise without conscience.

‘Can anyone still doubt,’ Trench was saying, ‘that the greatest conspiracy of modern times is the international movement – the rise and the spread of Communism? The
international conspiracy between Russia and world Jewry to spread this despicable idea, this farcical pretence of a common humanity, across the world? What other race could do this? What other race
is international? A country that harbours Jews nurtures the real Fifth Column, the only Fifth Column that matters. A race without nation, that feels loyalty to no nation. A race that knows only one
loyalty – that of Jew to Jew, that of Jew to the Jewish idea – Communism!’

They were on the meat course. Lamb, mint sauce, roast potatoes, a pleasing hint of rosemary, and a bellyfull of hatred.

‘Why, why would a man as obviously intelligent as Hitler root out from the population so many who might otherwise contribute their labour or their capital at a time of the rebuilding of
Germany? Can we imagine that such a decision was taken lightly, was taken arbitrarily? Did he want half Europe howling at him over the Jews? Of course not. Hitler recognises the enemy within. And
so must we. We must expose the conspiracy of organised Jewry. And first and foremost we must rid the Conservative Party of its pernicious influence.’

Trench had stunned the table into silence. Not so much with what he was saying – for all Alex knew he might well be the only one who disagreed with young Trench – as the force with
which he said it. Alex had thin tolerance for politicians who treated any gathering as an audience, made speeches rather than conversed. Daffy clearly had more, or she would not have invited the
little prick, or any of the other little pricks who had failed at the simple task of gracing her table over the years, but she flashed her beaming smile at everyone only to find most eyes fixed
downward. Alex had stopped eating, Mungo was picking at his lamb as though wondering what it was. Fermanagh, however, spoke.

‘All I can say, young man, is “words, words, words”.’

‘You have a plan for action?’

It was a prick’s remark when uttered to any man who had seen combat in war – and Fermanagh was, famously in his day a veteran of the battle of Omdurman.

‘Fine,’ the old man said, ‘you want a plan of action, I’ll give you one.’

Fermanagh pointed his fork straight at Trench’s chest.

‘Try this on for size. Others have tried this and failed, so here’s your chance. Get rid of the Minister of War. D’ye understand me? Get rid of the Minister of War! Get up on
your hind legs in the House and call for Hore-Belisha to resign. He’s in the cabinet. He’s completely bloody useless in my opinion. And it so happens . . . he’s a Jew.’

The last three words were uttered as though throwaway rather than the point of the argument. Fermanagh wasn’t even looking at Trench as he spoke them. The fork withdrew to the plate. The
knife sliced up another mouthful of lamb. If Fermanagh thought he’d thrown down the gauntlet in such a way that Trench would have to commit himself to doing something, he was wrong. The
challenge brought forth more words, words, words.

‘There is no place for the Jew in the Conservative Party, there is no place for the Jew in British politics . . . there is no place for the Jew in Britain. We must drive them from office,
from power and ultimately we must drive them from Britain.’

Mungo set down his knife and fork, turned to Alex, no longer the confidential half-whisper, but a voice that everyone in the room could hear.

‘Y’know, old boy, I seem to have lost me appetite. But, God help me, I just can’t eat and listen to a man talk such utter shite.’

So saying, he rose from his seat. One hand seized Trench by his collar, the other twisted his right arm behind his back. Mungo then bellowed for a footman, steered his captive into the hallway
and, as the footman pulled back the front door, placed one foot against his backside and booted him down the steps and into the street.

Mungo looked back through the open doors into the dining room. His gaze fixed coolly on his wife.

‘Daphne, my dear, a word if you would be so kind.’

‘I . . . er . . . er . . . darling . . . my guests . . .’

‘Daphne!!!’

Without a word she followed him into his study, the footman closed the doors behind her. Her guests looked at one another in a silence broken only by the roar of Mungo’s rage.

‘When will you ever learn that you cannot decide British Foreign Policy at the dining table?’